Summary
- Each voter ranks the candidates in order of preference (top-to-bottom, or best-to-worst, or 1st, 2nd, 3rd, etc.). The voter may be allowed to rank candidates as equals, to express indifference between them. To save time, candidates omitted by a voter may be treated as if the voter ranked them at the bottom.
- For each pairing of candidates (as in a round-robin tournament) count how many votes rank each candidate over the other candidate. Thus each pairing will have two totals: the size of its majority and the size of its minority.
For most Condorcet methods, those counts usually suffice to determine the complete order of finish. They always suffice to determine whether there is a Condorcet winner. Additional information may be needed in the event of ties. Ties can be pairings that have no majority, or they can be majorities that are the same size; these ties will be rare when there are many voters. Some Condorcet methods may have other kinds of ties; for example, it would not be rare for two or more candidates to win the same number of pairings, when there is no Condorcet winner.
Read more about this topic: Condorcet Method
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